Mock and Saw

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

The brouhaha over the Abu Ghraib abuse pictures has been put into grisly perspective with the beheading of an American hostage in Iraq.

The story is tragically reminiscent of the Daniel Pearl murder: the captive, a civilian guilty of nothing more than a U.S. citizenship, was paraded before cameras; then his head was sawed off with a knife and held up by the masked terrorists as a trophy of their kill. Finally, the video was uploaded onto the internet by a web-savvy Islamo-fascist and posted on an Arabic website.

The liberal media sirens have been wailing relentlessly over the past week about the maltreatment of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American soldiers. And they're probably right to make an issue of it.

But amid the hoopla, we must keep in mind the relative insignificance of those crimes when juxtaposed with the colossal horrors of our enemies. The abuse and humiliation of Iraqi detainees, after all, pales in comparison to the unspeakable savagery that was visited on Nick Berg. Being stripped and forced into degrading poses is simply nothing compared to this: